Bournemouth 7s Festival has an incredibly dynamic and creative team and over the last few months we’ve been introducing you to the people behind the World’s Largest Sport and Music Festival.
In this ‘Meet The Team’, we caught up with our Managing Director:
Name: Craig Mathie
Role: Managing Director
B7s Tenure: 11 years
Can you tell us about your role as Managing Director in more detail?
Managing events, particularly in a small company, requires every member of our team to wear a variety of different hats during the planning cycle for the festival and my role is no different. I am responsible for the day-to-day project management of the festival itself and coordinating our team’s efforts in delivering it.
Alongside the overall management of the business, I look after the health and safety planning, some of our contractors, suppliers and staffing and our key sponsor accounts. I love the variety of my role but, more than that, I love working with our incredible team to keep pushing standards and delivering the UK’s favourite sport and music festival.
What is your top highlight of Bournemouth 7s Festival?
Having been in the business for more than 10 years, I have a host of fond memories. Until the 2021 festival, I probably would have been most proud of the team making it through our 2014 festival when the heavens descended and we almost got rained off.
However, the absolute highlight for me has to be in delivering a festival right on the back of a pandemic. After losing our 2020 event to coronavirus, we were just delighted to still have our team together. However, when we got the green light with just 42 days to go until the festival gates opened, my whole team went into overdrive to make the festival happen. I’ve never been prouder to see people flooding through the doors or of the amazing feedback we received afterwards.
What are you most looking forward to for 2022?
We’ve got some really exciting new developments up our sleeves for this year with a host of new arenas planned – as well as bringing back some old ones! It will be great to have a bit more normality (hopefully) as we look to deliver our 15th Anniversary festival as the events industry gets back to work.
We can’t wait to open the gates for B7s 2022 and see our loyal fans flooding through the gates once again 💛